In a letter from June 23, 1989 to Gottfried Helnwein's wife Renate. "...I was taken with his (Helnwein's) work. He is one of the very few exciting painters we have today...

"Well, the world is a haunted house, and Helnwein at times is our tour guide through it."

Sean Penn

Source

Actor, director

Interview in 'Ninth November Night', a documentary about the art of Gottfried Helnwein, by Henning Lohner, Los Angeles, 2003

"Not all of Gottfried's work is on a canvas. A lot of it is the way he's approached life. And it doesn't take someone knowing him to know that. You take one look at the paintings and you say "this guy has been around." You can't sit in a closet - and create this. This level of work is earned.
As an artist my strongest reaction to Helnwein's work is that it challenges me to be better at what I do. There are very few people that achieve utter excellence in what they do.
And I think that Gottfried Helnwein is certainly one of those people."

Sean Penn

Source

Actor, Director

Interview in 'Ninth November Night', a documentary about the art of Gottfried Helnwein, by Henning Lohner, Los Angeles, 2003

"Gottfried Helnwein’s art is deeply rooted in the present. The subject of his paintings are our times: the dark side of our times, violence, cruelty, war, suppression. Helnwein’s own Actions, ‘Hallo Dudler’(Hello Sufferer) and ‘Allzeit bereit’(Ever Ready) in the mid 1970s are probably the last elements which one could describe as uniquely “Austrian” in Helnwein’s art. After that Helnwein is a German painter, whose paintings one must view in relation to Gerhard Richter’s broken Photorealism in order to determine their true international status... The entirety of Helnwein’s work is a dispute with reality: stemming from a spirit of objection. That defines it’s fierceness. That defines it’s signifiance and its magnitude."

"For Helnwein, creativity is not a vocation but a mission. His subject matter is the human condition. The metaphor for his art is dominated by the image of the child, but not the carefree innocent child of popular imagination. Helnwein instead creates the profoundly disturbing yet compellingly provocative image of the wounded child. The child scarred physically and the child scarred emotionally from within."

Robert Flynn Johnson

Source

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

From his essay for the catalogue of the solo show "The Child - Works by Gottfried Helnwein", California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2004

"Helnwein is the next generation’s final ally, a skilled provocateur forcing us to confront the legacy we have bequeathed upon our children. Helnwein is our chronicler, our conscience, the antidote to our failing memories. He refuses to let us forget."

In a letter to his Gallerist Martin Muller of Modernism Gallery San Francisco

"Gottfried is one of my mentors - on any artistic thing I've done."

Marilyn Manson

Source

musician, artist

Interview with Marilyn Manson, conducted by Evie Sullivan for INROCK Japan and NEWS Austria. It took place in Los Angeles, July, 2004

"Helnwein’s fight for expression and stance against oppression are reasons why I chose him as an artistic partner. An artist that doesn't provoke will be invisible. Art that doesn't cause strong emotions has no meaning. Helnwein has that internalized."

"I'll never forget the sensation I had at the unveiling of Gottfried Helnwein's "Kindskopf" (Head of a Child) in the Russian Museum.
And not just because this enormous canvas (six metres in height, four in breadth), well-known from reproductions, seemed to operate in a whole new way in the real, quasi-monumental space of the museum's exhibition-hall, - I realised that I was looking at the inner content of this innovative picture from a whole new point of view."

Alexander Borovsky

Source

Curator for Contemporary Art at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Essay for the monograph of the Helnwein-Retrospctive in the The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, 1997

"The most powerful images that deal with Nazism and Holocaust themes are by Anselm Kiefer and Helnwein, although, Kiefer's work differs considerably from Helnwein's in his concern with the effect of German aggression on the national psyche and the complexities of German cultural heritage. But Kiefer and Helnwein's work are both informed by the personal experience of growing up in post-war German speaking countries...
William Burroughs said that the American revolution begins in books and music, and political operatives implement the changes after the fact. To this maybe we can add art.
And Helnwein's art might have the capacity to instigate change by piercing the veil of political correctness to recapture the primitive gesture inherent in art."

"The paintings are inspired and disconcerting, intriguing and gut-wrenching, inviting and ominous. If Helnwein is celebrating anything in his artwork, it's the thin line between innocence and the loss of innocence. The canvases in Helnwein's exhibit hit you in the solar plexus, what the best art always does."

Jonathan Curiel

Source

SF Weekly, "Dark Side of the Mouse: Using Disney Cartoons to Explore the Line Between Innocence and Experience", San Francisco, 2014

"Again and again, he has painted children in brutal, violent settings. He has used Chris­tian iconography to depict Nazi officers, and juxtaposed rampaging soldiers with Images of childhood innocence. Visceral reactions come with the territory: one Installation in Cologne was physically attacked by neo Nazis. And yet, he says, he does not set out to shock. "Shock is a useless effect," he says. "Somebody in shock is completely useless. I want to make somebody think."
Instead, Helnwein's work speaks of a deep psychological need for meaning, even as it takes the form of violence and confrontation. Such an approach is rooted in the uneasy silences of growing up in post-war Austria and the shattered illusions of his early adult life, yet is still infused with an uneasy ideal­ism. Over the past 30 years, he has become an art superstar. His paintings and photographs command large prices. Helnwein has the air of a vet­eran rock star and the lifestyle to match it."

From a letter that Egon Bahr wrote to Gottfried Helnwein in 2014, after he saw the painting 'Epiphany I',(mixed media, oil and acrylic on canvas, 1996). Egon Karl-Heinz Bahr (18 March 1922 – 19 August 2015) was the creator of the "Ostpolitik" promoted by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, for whom he served as Secretary of the Chancellor's Office from 1969 until 1972. Between 1972 and 1990 he was an MP in the Bundestag of the Federal Republic of Germany and from 1972 until 1976 was also a Minister of the Federal Government. Bahr was a key figure in multiple negotiation sessions between not only East and West Germany, but also Germany and the Soviets. In addition to his instrumental role in Ostpolitik, Bahr was also an influential voice in negotiating the Treaty of Moscow, the Treaty of Warsaw, the Transit Treaty of 1971 and the Basic Treaty of 1972.

"As long ago as 1963 a fellow-artist and I imagined the horrible future of a free-lance artist.
The topic of our discussion was not so much finances as the necessity of letting go and totally abandoning oneself. At the time I had the idea of inventing something like a "fitness training of geniuses".
In retrospect I must say that I know very few artists who have persevered in this imaginary training programme.
Gottfried Helnwein is one of them."

Wolfgang Bauer

Source

poet, playwright

Essay "Inspired by Helnwein" for the catalogue of the Installation and one man show "Apokalypse" at the Dominican Church in Krems, Museum of Lower Austria, 1999

"The Viennese Helnwein is part of a tradition going back to the 18th century, to which Messerschmidt's grimacing sculptures also belong, on which one of Freud's pupils wrote a long treatise.
One sees, too, the common ground of these works with those of Arnulf Rainer or Nitsch, two other Viennese, who display their own bodies in the frame of reference of injury, pain, and death. One can also see this fascination for body language goes back to the expressive gesture in the work of Egon Schiele."

"The paintings and pastels by Gottfried Helnwein appear to be photorealist. But unlike his sharp-focus colleagues, Helnwein's paintings carry powerful covert messages. He is a politically committed artist ... and in his case, you get more than what you see.
His work, in a multiplicity of media, manifests Nietzsche's assertion that "Authenticity of the creative artist can supply meaning to the despair and absurdity of existence."

Peter Selz

Source

Professor Emeritus, Department of Art History, University of California, Berkeley - Former Curater at the Musem of Modern Art, New York

Essay "Helnwein: The Artist as Provocateur" for the Monograph of the Helnwein-Retrospctive at the The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Palace Edition, St. Petersburg, 1997.
2nd edition: Koenemann, Cologne, 1988

"For Helnwein, the child is the symbol of innocence, but also of innocence betrayed. In today’s world, the malevolent forces of war, poverty, and sexual exploitation and the numbing, predatory influence of modern media assault the virtue of children.
Helnwein’s work concerning the child includes paintings, drawings, and photographs, and it ranges from subtle inscrutability to scenes of stark brutality.
Of course, brutal scenes—witness The Massacre of the Innocents—have been important and regularly visited motifs in the history of art. What makes Helnwein’s art significant is its ability to make us reflect emotionally and intellectually on the very expressive subjects he chooses.
Many people feel that museums should be a refuge in which to experience quiet beauty divorced from the coarseness of the world. This notion sells short the purposes of art, the function of museums, and the intellectual curiosity of the public.
Works by Gottfried Helnwein will inspire and enlighten many; it is also sure to upset some. It is not only the right but the responsibility of the museum to present art that deals with important and sometimes controversial topics in our society."

Harry S.Parker III

Source

Director of Museums, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Essay for the catalogue of the solo show "The Child - Works by Gottfried Helnwein", California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2004

"Gottfried Helnwein's self-portraits in his "Black Mirror" series reach far beyond the boundaries of the ordinary self-portrait. They reflect the inner wants and desperation which lies within the viewer's own self. Helnwein points out the new form of the modern self-portrait which involves the creator and viewer alike."

"It has been described that the artist's place on the planet is to be the canary that's sent down into the coal-mine to sniff out whether the air down there is poisonous. And if the canary comes up alive we can all go there. It takes a particular canary to sniff that out, and I think Gottfried Helnwein keeps coming back up to the surface no matter how poisonous the air and that gives us a lot of belief in our own ability to do it and to reconcile things."

Sean Penn

Source

Actor, Director

Interview in 'Ninth November Night', a documentary about the art of Gottfried Helnwein, by Henning Lohner, Los Angeles, 2003

"What Helnwein creates, regardless the medium - watercolor, oil, photography, performance art, sculpture - is a thorny psychological excursion into our sublimated self, our obscured corners and dark humors. His explorations into war crimes, Catholicism, disfigurement and the Holocaust are both unflinching and surgical. His work is in museum collections around the world, and critics have labeled it grotesque, fearless, disturbing and veer[ing] dangerously close to offensive. 'People are surprised', he says, when they discern that he doesn't seem insane."

"Adults bring a trunkful of contradictory cultural baggage to any representations of children. That's what makes the work of Helnwein so powerful. In his show, "The Child," (The Legion of Honor, San Francisco Fine Arts Museums), deformed infants and bandaged children stir feelings of pity, defiance and uneasiness about exploitation. There's an ambiguously disturbing painting of a girl aiming a gun into an open refrigerator and another of a bare-breasted mother and child surrounded by Aryan soldiers.
But the most haunting images may be the ones of children who seem strangely oblivious to the adult gaze. Some of Helnwein's children peer right past the onlooker. Others sleep, dreaming of anything but us behind their silky eyelids. And some, like the enormous, half- shadowed "Head of a Child" see straight through us with cloudless, infinite blue eyes."

"With titles like ‘‘The Murmur of the Innocents’’ and ‘‘God of Sub-Humans,’’ these works — executed with obsessive, old-master-worthy technique — can be as bludgeoning as, say, a Rammstein riff, but you can’t take your eyes off them"

"I think in anything that is really relevant and emotional art, there is some kind of a mirror that people experience. I don't think that you can recognize a feeling from something that you look at unless it's part of yourself, and so when someone is willing to take on the sadness, the irony, the ugliness and the beauty in the kind of way that Gottfried Helnwein does."

Sean Penn

Source

Actor, director

Interview in 'Ninth November Night', a documentary about the art of Gottfried Helnwein, by Henning Lohner, Los Angeles, 2003

"To me Helnwein is the ultimate humanistic artist: A conceptualist embracing the image. A virtuoso and a visionary with one eye behind the veil of the world, the other reflecting endless horror, beauty, loss, humour and melancholy - all with a steady hand. The position is supreme, the means are penetrating and the message as deep as it gets. To me the strange silent directness in Helnweins work is unrivaled, no other artist today tells the dim story of the world in a more disturbing and moving way. His work, views and perspectives are completely congruent and appeals to me in a very direct and personal way."

Alexander Natas

The Stiletto Projects, Copenhagen

"Over the years Gottfried Helnwein has developed a unique style and today he is one of the greatest artists of the world."

In a letter to Gottfried Helnwein, Tomi Ungerer wrote: 'I have a phenomenal admiration for your work.', Cork, Ireland, 2006

"So tonight I went to Gottfried Helnwein's show at his studio in downtown L.A. and just about everyone was there. I turn to the right -- Sean Penn. I turn to the left -- Beck. Arnold is dropping off a gift. Kevin Smith is wandering around in big, baggy shorts and looking at Gottfried's larger works. Leo (DiCaprio) looks like a cat. Mena Suvari is upset about the flourescent lighting. Shannyn Sossamon shows up and we drink a beer together. My attorney is there (I mean, isn't everyone?) and he gives me some free legal advice…"

"We decided to choose the photographs of Helnwein for our cover artwork. We really like his attitude towards art and the way he presented us. It turned out that a picture of a band can be something different, - real art."

Rammstein

German industrial metal band

"This was the moment when I sensed for the first time', Helnwein has since written, '[that] you can change something with aesthetics, you can get things moving in a very subtle way, you can get even the powerful and strong to slide and totter, anything actually if you know the weak points and tap at them ever so gently by aesthetic means.' For the following three-and-a-half decades he has relentlessly pursued that goal, masterfully incorporating everything from painting to performance to photography, regularly causing art world outcry and public fury. Yet, his art is successful less for its evident tendency to provoke than for its extraordinary ability to perplex.
My art is not giving answers," Helnwein has said. "It is asking questions." In fact, his work is insistently open-ended. Like Goya's Disasters of War, his art queries time and again, "How can this have happened?" At last we recognize that Helnwein asks questions not in order to solicit answers - hate has no reason - but rather in order that we might begin to pose our own."

Jonathon Keats

Source

Novelist, artist, art-critic

From the essay 'The Art of Humanity', published in "Ninth November Night', the catalogue for a documentary about Gottfried Helnwein and his Art referring to the Holocaust, Museum of Tolerance, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Los Angeles, November 9, 2003

"An alternative title to 'Angels Sleeping' for this exhibition could be “All Hail to the Wounded Child,” as many of the works center on irreparably wounded children (both externally and internally) as the innocent victims of war. The children in Helnwien’s works may also represent the lost or destroyed child in all of us, not only as victims of war, but as victims of modern society, with all its mindless violence and perverse attraction to aggressive mobs and disturbances. If there were a soundtrack to this exhibition, it would be a long, endless scream."

"Gottfried Helnwein's latest exhibition, "Face It", is the artist's first show in his native Austria since 1985. A retrospective of 40 works from the 1970s to the present, it is more shocking than the Royal Academy's infamous "Sensation" of 1997. Helnwein aims to disturb not with, say, an elephant-dung Madonna, as Chris Ofili did then, but with a far more controversial Virgin. Of all his paintings, the most disturbing is Epiphany (1996), for which he dips into our collective memory of Christianity's most famous birth. This Austrian Catholic Nativity scene has no magi bearing gifts. Madonna and child are encircled by five respectful Waffen SS officers palpably in awe of the idealised, kitsch-blonde Virgin. The Christ toddler, who stands on Mary's lap, stares defiantly out of the canvas. Helnwein's baby Jesus is Adolf Hitler."

Julia Pascal

Source

New Statesman, UK

'Nazi dreaming', Art - Julia Pascal on the man set on reminding Austria of the past it would rather forget, New Statesman, UK, April 10, 2006

"Two days after the Sandy Hook school massacre, a survival gear company called Black Dragon Tactical composed a new slogan to promote sales of armored backpack inserts. “Arm the teachers,” the company declared on Facebook. “In the meantime, bulletproof the kids.”...
The question may be political, but the keenest response is to be found at a retrospective of paintings and photographs by the Austrian-American artist Gottfried Helnwein. Helnwein’s extraordinary work depicts the fragile innocence of children. Devoid of grown-up sentimentalism, his images can be overwhelming, especially those that show how that innocence falters in an adult world."

Jonathon Keats

Source

Forbes Magazine

'The True Impact of Violence On Childhood? Why Every American Ought To See The Paintings Of Gottfried Helnwein', Forbes, US, December 28, 2012

"An artist with conscience, a fearless man with a penchant for profoundly bizarre and complex, meaningful images, Gottfried Helnwein is making a grand re-entry to San Francisco. His work was exhibited here four years ago when his freaky mixed-media portrait of Mickey Mouse - "Mouse I" - was part of the SF Museum of Modern Art's "The Darker Side of Playland - Childhood Imagery."
The paintings are extraordinary, grotesque, powerful, "difficult" and challenging, according to the curator of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco Fine Arts Museums) exhibit, Robert Flynn Johnson.
They are all that, and more. A simple description of the works, without context, would only indicate a freak show: a photo-like painting of Hitler with two very Aryan-looking children, an actual bar of soap encased under them; a group of uniformed Nazis gazing adoringly on a contemporary Mother and Child (Helnwein explaining that the people in the photograph that was the basis for the painting were actually surrounding Hitler); images of normal children mixed with misshapen, ill, tortured youngsters. "Why would people cause so much pain to others?" Helnwein asks, and he shows the pain, unflinchingly, but not to titillate the demented or to horrify the ignorant.
"The Child" (exhibition) - located in a part of the Legion next to a permanent exhibit of Renaissance Mother and Child images by Pontormo, Tintoretto, Raphael, and others - has far more to offer than politics, morality, controversy and horror. Although there is no doubt that primarily Helnwein is "the artist as provocateur," he is also an artist in the sense of creating unique and lasting images."

"Like a modern-day Goya, Gottfried Helnwein’s art addresses themes of inhumanity, violence and the virtue of personal expression. Over more than four decades, the artist has pursued a singular, radical vision realized in monumental paintings and photographs. With stark and probing psychological intensity, he critiques not only the past, but present-day veneers, jolting us from the comfort of complacency. Such confrontations are informed by his upbringing in post-war Vienna, Austria—an experience that fueled the artist’s passion for truth and tolerance. Today, Helnwein immerses himself in our ever-changing cultural landscape, working from his studio in Los Angeles. "

Crocker Art Museum

Source

'Gottfried Helnwein: Inferno of the Innocents', announcement for Helnwein's solo show at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, January 29 – April 24, 2011, crockerartmuseum.org

"Helnwein’s subject matter involves the complexities of the human condition. His disturbing yet provocative images of physically and emotionally wounded children have been seen as metaphors for larger global issues. He portrays the innocence of adolescence against the backdrop of shameful historical events like the Holocaust to highlight the fragility of humanity in an unstable world. Like Wong from Asia and Cindy Sherman from the United States, Helnwein offers up dramatic scenarios featuring youthful protagonists that beg a viewer to complete the equation.
The child’s face – painted in a realistic style yet eerily unreal – may allude to the uncertain (in limbo-like) quality of Helnwein’s own childhood. Helnwein is among a network of contemporary artists expressing visions that embrace and also transcend cultural nomenclature. "

"An exhibition called Sensations caused a few upsets, first in London and then in New York. Central to the reaction was a large-scale portrait of a child-killer assembled from, if I remember correctly, the palm prints of children. So far, so bland. The shock element in art has been much talked about in the last five years but art that actually shocks has been thin on the ground during the same period.
Step forward then, Gottfried Helnwein.
By and large, if art is going to shock, it better have something shocking to say, and it's clear that Helnwein has found that."

John Hendry

Source

art critic, London

"The Shock of the Real", John Hendry, Reuters UK, International / Art, London, May 20, 2000

"Helnwein likes to linger at boundaries.
Whoever wants to pass through is closely examined by him. Like Goya he is one of the magic customs officials of art. (Rousseau, on the other hand, always stayed on the other side of the border even though he really was a customs official by profession!)
Whoever wants to enter the plane of art has to be able to understand and communicate reality. Helnwein is not only an artist but also a perfect transformer.
The so called imagination should not come into play at the beginning of a world, but its nuclear power should be released only at the moment of transformation, of metamorphosis."

Wolfgang Bauer

Source

poet, playwright

Essay "Inspired by Helnwein" for the catalogue of the Installation and one man show "Apokalypse" at the Dominican Church in Krems, Museum of Lower Austria, 1999

"Helnwein has always said that he paints children because they symbolize humanity better than adults. This may be so, but perhaps Helnwein's images are so profoundly disturbing because of the disparity between the portrayal of children- in all their idealized purity- and the portrayal of suffering. His work is a mesmerizing commentary not only on the exploitation of children in our culture, but also on emotional vacancy and moral torpor, which too often implicate us in the pain of others. By consciously mingling his themes of purity and culpability, Helnwein has presented viewers with a disorienting yet provocative way of apprehending both history and suffering."

Nirmala Nataraj

art-critic, San Francisco

"Helnwein's preoccupation with the dark side of modern history, including its abuse of images, has never left him. He did a whole series of paintings so dark as to appear imageless. But he intended them not as mirrors of dark times but as counterthrusts to the aggressive reach of so much contemporary culture.
People will respond to his concern with the power of images.
We willingly subject ourselves to their power every day without really understanding it. If nothing else, his pictures, no matter how confrontational, stand still and permit us, even defy us, to understand how they work upon us."

Kenneth Baker

San Francisco Chronicle Art-Critic

"The viewer is lured into pondering whether the lone figure of a child in a muted pink dress is asleep on the ground, or has been hit by a roadside in a puddle, or on white sand in the sun?
Few parents are likely to trot such a painting home to hang over the family hearth, but the artist's ability to conjure up open-ended dramatic narrative is unquestionable.
...people caught in poses and with facial expressions that leave everything to the imagination: Are they happy or sad? Asleep or dead? Singing or letting forth with primal screams? - Cleverly conceived conundrums."

Jo-Ann Lewis

Source

The Washington Post

"Conundrums", Jo-Ann Lewis, The Washington Post, August 3, 1981

"Helnwein's work is perfectly executed proof of the mastery of all the available means to outdo the reality in depiction.
Only in this way was Helnwein able to trigger the shock that he intended, a shock with a possible healing effect.
Helnwein developed a visual language depicting apocalyptic visions that can be understood all over the world. The beautiful and the ugly, the fear of the terrible and the power of its fascination, the clearly recognisable and that which cannot be interpreted but lurks outside the painting as well as outside the nursery door, and more closely intertwined in these pictures than those of any other living artist."

Peter Zawrel

Director, Museum of Lower Austria

"Gottfried Helnwein is a brave virtuoso of versatility. In his work, he forces us to confront, via his visual wit, brio, and candor, the human face of violence and angst.
Helnwein's work prods us to react, yet not simply because it is "shocking". His main message in fact is: be brave. Be daring. And most importantly, be willing to confront even the darkest side of human nature - after all, it's something we cannot escape. "

Reena Jana

artcritic, Flash Art

"Look at Helnwein's painting under Visual Sociology. What was Helnwein saying? Why was he willing to offend. Why did one of my students make a giant box that when opened had a lovely smiling face inside that said "F^&* the Patriot Act"?? Isn't that a lot like what Helnwein and Kiefer and Beuys were doing? Maybe saying "wake up and look at what you're doing?"

Jeanne Curran

Professor of Sociology, California State University

"Austria has been one of the main hubs of European culture, especially in music and art. The artists are not always conventional or conformist. Like the recent Nobel Prize winner for literature, Elfriede Jelinek, some of Helnwein’s work, which takes an uncomfortable look at Austria’s past and the unhealthily close relationship between Church and Sate in the Nazi era, has caused controversy.
I think we should be in no doubt that we are in the presence of the work of an artist of exceptional stature."

"Stunning. It’s the best single word to describe 'Inferno of the Innocents', the exhibit of work by Gottfried Helnwein that opened at the Crocker Art Museum. Helnwein is one hell of a painter. His massive, photo-like pictures of vulnerable children are breathtaking, both in the often disturbing nature of the imagery and in the artist’s virtuostic ability to mimic life with pigment (a mixture of oil and acrylic) and brush. Each bloodied hair seems utterly real; pale, near-translucent skin seems to cover actual flesh, and the eyes of Helnwein’s child subjects are damp and deep. But, while Helnwein is a master painter, his skill serves only to bring his carefully crafted scenes to fruition; it is the artist’s combination of sophisticated brushwork and calculated, provocative imagery that defines his art."

"His paintings represent a fusion of historic and contemporary artistic practices, uniting the Romantic aesthetic of Caspar David Friedrich, the political radicalism of Viennese Actionists and the technical
precision of the photorealists of the 1970’s. Although often based on photographs, or inspired by film stills, his paintings are built up in fine layers of traditional oil paint and represent a degree of
technical accomplishment rarely seen in European academies. He uses this technical accomplishment and finesse to carry across the strong political message contained in his art."

Peter Murray

Director of the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork

"The works of Gottfried Helnwein are technically classified as hyper-realism (surpassing super-realism) and at first glance are practically indistinguishable from photographs. Though realistic in terms of technique, most of Helnwein's works are characterized by metaphorical implications.
Included in all of Gottfried Helnwein's work, this basic principle demonstrates a reflection of the aesthetics of popular culture and irony, and represent Helnwein's major outlook on the world. Gottfried Helnwein is endowed with perfect pitch and distinguished sense of contemporary issues.
As a painter whose art deals with issues confronting human society, Helnwein creates a new standard of measuring modernism. "

"Helnwein's realization (of the opera "The Child Dreams" after Hanoch Levin's play) takes the breath away: a view of dozens of bloodied children's bodies, some of them hanging, some of them turning over and over in mid-air, as a vocal ensemble sings their words while kneeling on stage.
This vision connects eerily with an exhibition in the Tel Aviv Performing Arts Centre plaza, adapted from one the Austrian Artist mounted in Cologne in 1988, marking the 50th anniversary of the Nazis' anti-Jewish Kristallnacht. It shows two rows of innocent, haunted-looking child's faces, one row with eyes open; the other with eyes closed, lined up as if in a concentration camp"

"Salvador Dali's "Hitler Masturbating" is a masterpiece of satire, or so says my inner Beavis, anyhow. Gottfried Helnwein's painting Epiphany I is another excellent example, reminding us that not only was Hitler once a baby, but also that we can recognize him without his mustache. "

Stephanie Burke and Jeriah Hildwine

Chicago Now, Art Talk

"The disturbing thing about Helnwein’s work is its ability to involve the viewer in the themes, strangely brought about by their detached presentation. It is a great marvel that an exhibition of such pristine images will leave you feeling dirty inside."

"Gottfried Helnwein’s "American Prayer" (2000) has taken up residency in my mind. I began to discover a semiotic richness in this painting worthy of what W.J.T. Mitchell has called a "metapicture" - a "picture that [is] used to show what a picture is". Mitchell situates the concept of metapicture in "'iconology', the study of the general ﬁeld of images and their relation to discourse," thereby cutting across Greenbergian self-reflexivity into an expanded context that includes popular culture as well as contemporary art. In this wider cultural field, a metapicture does more than reflect on the nature of the picture itself and calls into question "the self-understanding of the observer". I will argue that "American Prayer" derives its theoretical relevance partly from its concealed hybridity, from the interplay between technological media and painting. In this work, the substitution of one medium by another reinforces the meaning that can be created from the iconographic substitution of the child by Pinocchio, and the replacement of the deity by Donald. In the end, Donald’s sideways glance at us indicates that this picture is really about us, the observers; it questions our own place in a cultural web of illusionism spun from the abiding human desire to overcome death."

"Helnwein is a ridiculously talented artist. That is basically all you need to know. Anything you could imagine art doing for you, or to you, any feeling it might instill in you or emotion it might remove from you, he captures, then cripples, reformats, and pastes into the cleft pallet of a 20-foot-tall gray-scale rendition of a deformed fetus soaking in formaldehyde.
The essence of realism and ability that every art major ever clamored to grasp, he manages to expel onto canvas with apparent ease. He produces paintings, and photographs that you can't help but wish you could recreate with the same vision, depth, and intrigue. "

Dallas Clayton

Writer, Los Angeles

"Helnwein is one of the greatest conceptual artists of the past hundred years"

Donald Ault

Professor of English, University of Florida

"The portraits of Hendrix, Joplin, and Lennon are particulary stirring because their ghostlike treatment translates as a poetic and humble tribute to major creative forces whose lives were tragically cut short. As exemplified by the paintings of Helnwein, the purpose of a contemporary portrait may extend well beyond biographical signification to stimulating reflection upon larger issues of social or political consequence"

David s. Ruben

Curator of 20th Century Art, Phoenix Art Museum

"People are much more content with watching the "real world" and reality television, than living their own lives, or watching something that comes from imagination. Imagination is a necessity, and I don't think it's sort of bad. I can dream up some images like I did with Helnwein, and they get censored, forbidden, - but I can take images which are far worse, that are on CNN and it's reality.
It's bad when imagination is censored by others, but when you censor it yourself, that's the worst. That's what's happening now with the dying breed of "artists," if I can use that word. People are afraid to say and do things because of how it will affect their career."

Marilyn Manson

Musician, artist

"The point of the images is that they put it up to you as a viewer. Given that, one potential line of criticism is that they are designed solely to be provocative, like Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra Hindley. But the abiding strength of Helnwein's work is that provocation is a means rather than an end; it is - however uncomfortable - morally grounded,
if not necessarily in a way that will please all observers."

"Scale is an important part of his strategy because, he wants to engage with the widest possible public. To this end, transgression is also central. Many of his images set out expressly to stop us in our tracks, confronting us with scenes of what look alarmingly like grotesque surgical experiments, of horrible torture, of children in distressing situations, of distorted and mutated flesh.
It's not all Grand Guignol though.
An extremely impressive work "Selection", made in 1988, consisted of a series of uniform, huge images of children's faces, stretching from Cologne's Ludwig Museum to its cathedral. The subtitle, (Ninth November Night), gave the clue to the event the work marked - the start of the Holocaust on Reichskristallnacht, November 9, 1938.
In presenting people with a series of entirely neutral, if rather beautiful, pictures of innocence and implicitly pointing out that just such innocents were sorted and selected for extermination, Helnwein was resurrecting an aspect of the past that most Germans and, perhaps even more so, Austrians, have preferred to forget.
It certainly annoyed someone to the extent that they came and vandalised it, symbolically cutting the throats of some of the images. Selection shares with Helnwein's more sensational work a desire to prod us into thought about our own attitudes and roles.
The real horror, as his work reiterates, is indifference and complacency. "

Aidan Dunne

art critic, The Irish Times

"In his last will, the Austrian playwright Thomas Bernhard, who died in 1989, banned the production of his texts on home soil. Bernhard never hid his fury at Austria's refusal to admit its history. Helnwein, born in 1948, clearly shares Bernhard's view. He is furious about Austria's self-image as victim of the Third Reich, rather than its willing collaborator.
In 1965 posters for the Freedom Party, later led by Jörg Haider, demanded: "Forget about the past! Look ahead at the future." Helnwein, then still a teenager, reacted by painting a portrait of Adolf Hitler that got him expelled from art school. His "crime" was to have reminded Austria of its best-known son."

Julia Pascal

New Statesman, UK

"Helnwein is a great believer in the ability of art to pass emotional memory on, as a reminder of the past or mainly as a warning of what the future might hold, for humanity, as far as he is concerned, has not learnt its lesson. Is there atonement in his artistic endeavors? I prefer the Jewish concept of “tikkun”, purification of the soul. It has a deeper meaning than the physical healing of scars, for it elevates us to the highest sphere of the spirit. The wounded girls close their eyes, but they are not blind. Behind their closed lids their gaze is clear and penetrating."

Nava Semel

Author, Playwright

"Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein's powerful and haunting paintings provide a disturbing commentary on Nazism and the Holocaust, regularly provoking outraged reactions from right-wingers in his native land and in Germany.
'I was amazed how deep pictures could reach into the hearts and minds of people - and how much they would talk to me about it,' he said, 'for me, art is like a dialogue.
- But my art is not giving answers, it is asking questions."

"The disturbing Work of Helnwein comes to Ireland Helnwein is a headline artist who works in tight sound bites on a very large scale. The works brand themselves with proof of his technical know-how in various media and are endorsed by the coolest celebrities of his generation. So much for the cover-story, so what lies within? Headlines lure you into stories that make you want to cry, smile or help to change the world. But when they stop at your own skin, you can get a sinking feeling, a sense of the bigness and badness outside and the impossibility of change."

Medb Ruane

The Sunday Times, UK

"Not even the children were spared; they, too, fell victim to the destruction.
It was Gottfried Helnwein's most convincing idea to present the consequences to this period without mercy" in such an unconventional manner. He made no use of photos of heaped corpses; children's portraits force the observer to stop and consider this idea. The fury with which the neo-nazis reacted to these portraits is understandable inasmuch as it is the very same fury with which they have for years been fighting against The Diary of Anne Frank; the murder of children rouses abhorrence and conflict in every human, whether they are motivated by ideology or insanity. The urge to destroy has survived; the portraits bear witness to its rage - an attempt was made to cut them to shreds. "People, please, stop,... look at these children's faces, multiply their number by a few hundred thousand. Only then will you realise or gain an inkling of the extent of the Holocaust, of the greatest tragedy in human history!
(About the installation 'Ninth November Night') "

Simon Wiesenthal

Holocaust survivor, Human Rights Activist

"I admire the work of Gottfried Helnwein a great deal. This photographic testimony encourages reflection and provokes the examination of conscience, which is necessary for every one of us where racism is concerned. The laceration of the portraits is proof of the fact that we cannot be indifferent to the warning of the "final solution". I consider myself lucky to be able to exhibit this gallery of memories in its present form in Lausanne.
The childrens' faces are to remind us that innumerable victims were needed during the past sixty years to get out of "the Night and the Fog.
(About the installation 'Ninth November Night')"

"Austrian-born and educated and now living Los Angeles, Helnwein employs a hyperrealist manner that will remind Americans of Gerhard Richter but, if anything, works to opposite effect. Rather than re-confirm post-modernist cynicism, Helnwein rekindles post-war anguish. This selection, going back more than three decades, emphasizes his preoccupation with the image of the child, from early Nitsch- and Schwarzkogler-influenced photo-actions (with the requisite bandages) to recent large portrait-like heads and depictions of Christ-child-like babes attracting odd, menacing crowds: tinged with surrealism, it’s an enduring shame and anger at the Nazi past – and the artist’s suspicion that Naziism hasn’t been eradicated."

" In art we can experience Holocaust at the Imperial War museum, Apocalypse in RCA, and we can just view Euguene Smith's photographs and Helnwein's amazing art within stupefaction, or we can even find ourselves attached with Tarantino's 'ironic, affectless and funny' violent images...
On one hand, the perception and cognition of reality within these images of death, dying and suffering are bound to change one's attitude, ethical and moral views, and opinions in a way where the familiarity to death is dissipated and has become submissive. It has become easier to face the idea of death. So one might argue the fact that desensitized impression is actually sensitizing. On the other hand, the artist, who chooses to exhibit and present the political and provocative images of pain as a means of catharsis in order to heal, might be bringing a new way of dealing with the issues of death, suffering and dying as in Helnwein's case."

"One thing you can't quibble over is the overwhelming impact of Helnwein's imagery - ethereal hallucinogenic meditations you enter effortlessly into. Hang one of these whatever-you-wanna-call-it's in a room and it totally permanently dominantly dicates the mood. Not much art can do that, which is what makes Gottfried Helnwein great."

"After wincing for a while, viewers found themselves admiring Helnwein's conceptual compositions. The artist knows that images of disfigured Great War veterans provide some of the impetus for early surrealism. He slams those references against an allusion to religious martyrdom, the episode of Jesus' presentation in the Temple of Solomon, often employed in Christian art to symbolize the contrast between worldly and spiritual splendor, between sin and innocence. "

"Helnwein's meticulous Irish landscapes are unashamedly aesthetic: gorgeous confections of pure, delicious spectacle. The typically epic but not inhuman scale imitates the subject matter. The tonal realism will make people go "Wow, are they paintings?" - thanks to the photorealist finish which seems free of the foibles of the human hand. Helnwein works with very small brushes - highlighting and subtly magnifying here, muting colours or creating shadows there; pushing some paintings towards momentary sleights of impressionism; and others towards seamless, burnished hyperreality.
The bird's eye view suggests a kind of superhuman vision which can simultaneously take in the entire view with breath-taking clarity, like some bionic eagle."

Mic Moroney

writer, art-critic, artist

"...These photo-paintings appear even more real than a photograph: they are hyper-real, super-saturated depictions of the world that surrounds us, as we would like to see it. Helnwein’s landscapes offer us the world as we see it in our mind’s eye, our memories.
What is certain is that with these works Helnwein has raised the bar for artists to come with art that is groundbreaking in terms of scale, skill and vision. Painted mountains, fields and sky can never be the same again."

Cristin Leach

The Times

"Helnwein is highly recommended even to those who do not have a predilection for morbid or grotesque art, for his intention is not merely to shock or titillate. Whereas many modern artists get lost in the artifice of excessive conceptualism, Gottfried Helnwein continues to produce challenging, thought-provoking work based on the weight of the subject matter, not the way in which it is presented. Having produced a wide range of imagery in a variety of mediums, Helnwein’s development is fascinating to trace from conceptual beginnings to his current synthesis of pop and fine art."

mors0120

UThink blogs, University of Minnesota

"Both Helnwein and Jeff Koons work in a wide variety of media—frequently on a large scale—and incorporate elements of pop culture and sexuality. But whereas Koons rejects hidden meaning and embraces the superficial “kitsch” element, Helnwein reappropriates these symbols as a means of enhancing his message. Symbols of innocence take on a decidedly sinister air—in Helnwein’s “Los Caprichos” painting installation, a maniacally grinning plastic Mickey Mouse looms over a series of canvases depicting maimed and vulnerable children. Yet Helnwein’s work comes across as more a statement about general victimization of the young and loss of innocence rather than purely a jab at pop culture. Both Koons and Helnwein have produced multiple self-portraits, but they are also drastically different in tone. Koons’ self-portraits glorify the artist in an excessively heroic manner that verges on the ironic, flawlessly groomed and surrounded by attractive women and/or the trappings of success. Helnwein’s self-portraits, on the other hand, depict the artist as a bandaged, disfigured, sub-human figure, often splattered with pigment and displaying all manner of expressions of pain and worry. Both artists indulge in a certain narcissism, but the effect is utterly different. This contrast highlights the basic difference between the two artists: Koons is content to revel in the decadent and superficial, while Helnwein is obsessed with physical and psychological anxieties."

"The new wave of rock-video grotesquerie isn't new at all, actually, the Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, whose self-portrait adorned the cover of an album by the German band Scorpions some years back, was doing images of medical horror twenty years ago."

Kurt Loder

MTV, USA

"Gottfried Helnwein's classic yet unnerving images transform sentimental representations of childhood into portraits of individual subjects frozen at the moment of suffering. His photo-paintings pirouette on the fine line between chocolate box pictures/excessive sentimentality and the cost to children of being treated as commodities, of suffering emotional or physical pain at a grown-up's hands.
High pictorial and technical values create compositions that recall contemporary cinema and seventeenth-century painting, expanding the treatment of time into epic. This apparent grandiosity plays against the immediacy of each suffering subject, underlining the different experience of time in childhood. Small hurts can devastate when you're a child. Big hurts stay with you for years, as survivors of Hitler's Anschluss testify.
Now, in the age of virtual use and abuse of children, Helnwein's insistence on valuing the humanity and charm of the littlest, the least powerful, offers a counterpoint to claims that suffering counts most when you're grown-up. It opens his practice into a series of pictorial mise-en-scènes, as did Rembrandt's tableaux in The Blinding of Samson (1636) or The Night Watch (1642)."

Medb Ruane

Art-critic, Ireland

"But what does the hyper-realism of Austrian-born, Irish-based artist Gottfried Helnwein say to us and about us in the context (of the exhibition) "Body Anxious"? His work is what puts this show on the map of bodily pain and anxiety. He has painted a hyper-realistic, oversized portrait of a little girl in a pink-and-white undershirt, her head and eyes swathed in gauze so recently wrapped that it glistens with blood. It is from Helnwein's "Los Caprichos" series, named after the famous Goya series. Art historians say Goya's "Caprichos" mark the beginning of the modern world of art because they were the first to look at, rather than avoid or symbolize, pain, fantasy, cruelty, disloyalty and any other number of grievous human traits."

Diane Heilenman

Art-critic

"There was an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art including Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein's Mickey. An entire wall was covered by the photographic black and white oil painting. The scale of this Mouse was enough to attract attention, but more than just its scale made it gripping. Mickey Mouse loomed over the viewer; this was not a friendly Mouse, nor a copy of the static corporate logo. This Mouse showed his teeth.
The facade of Disney and America in the guise of the Mouse is one of the things that Helnwein and others present to us. Claes Oldenburg took the facade to its literal extreme when he proposed a flat Mouse's image for a facade to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, and produced a flat Mouse sculpture. Helnwein, Oldenburg and others are using the Mouse to make social and cultural comments about our society, in the broadest sense, but with humor."

"The Centre International d'Art Contemporain de Montreal chose a powerful show of black-and-white photos by the Viennese-born artist Gottfried Helnwein. Helnwein's work is everything that Annie Leibovitz's, shown last spring at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is not. While both shoot celebrities - Helnwein's subjects include Keith Richards, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, William S.Burroughs, and an extremly wasted Andy Warhol - Helnwein's work is concentrated on the Psychological rather than on the gimmicky and the theatrical."

"Gottfried Helnwein's wondrous staging of "Der Rosenkavalier" is eccentric and anachronistic — yet utterly faithful to its spirit.
The thing you should know about this "Rosenkavalier" is that it is terrific. Richard Strauss' opera sounds great and looks sensational. It is excellently sung, sumptuously conducted by Kent Nagano and, thanks to Gottfried Helnwein, wondrously strange.
Helnwein — the Austrian artist (painter, photographer, performance artist, filmmaker) who has a studio in downtown L.A. — is known for everything from Marilyn Manson videos to Holocaust installations.
Helnwein's vision of "Rosenkavalier" is monochromatic and a riot of color. It is oddly traditional yet seriously odd. It is updated but couldn't be more 18th century. And none of those opposites contradicts. "

Mark Swed

Los Angeles Times

"What dominates, however, in a manner I've seldom seen is Helnwein's use of color -- the monochromatic blue of Act 1 even extends to skin color. Herr von Faninal's house is bathed in a rich golden sheen, from the orange glow of Ochs' silly wig to the platinum of the lovely Sophie's almost-there dress. The final act, in a cheap restaurant, is mainly a glaring red, again from Ochs' wig to his skin and the costumes of the huge band of players. The walls of the restaurant are, incidentally, lined with Helnwein's own works, mainly huge photo-realistic portraits of contemporary women. The 200 costumes Helnwein designed for the piece deserve a whole review for themselves this is inventiveness gone wild, a genius concept, and a huge addition to the production. There might be purists in disagreement here, but this would seem to be a "Rosenkavalier" for the ages."

Madeleine Shaner

The Hollywood Reporter

"The Los Angeles Opera's much-anticipated new production of Strauss's "Rosenkavalier" opened on Sunday night and you can bet that the high-concept and boldly stylized sets and costumes by the designer and visual artist Gottfried Helnwein are going to provoke the strongest reactions.
Restraint was not a hallmark of the outlandishly captivating production. In a detailed program note, Helnwein writes that the era of Maria Theresa was a time when everything was theater, at least for the upper class, and that over-the-top fashion styles often included masks and white-face. His designs combine spartan sets with wildly extravagant costumes ranging in style from the surreal to the ridiculous. Act I is bathed in shades of blue. In their stiffly modern blue suits and blue-faced makeup, the Marschallin's notaries look like the members of Blue Man Group. In Act II, the mansion of Herr von Faninal, a wealthy commoner with aristocratic pretensions, glows with garish golden yellows. Faninal's servants could be creatures from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," no doubt an intentional evocation: the production begins with projected scenes from Robert Wiene's 1926 silent film adaptation of "Der Rosenkavalier," and Wiene also directed "Caligari." - In any event, the cast seemed empowered by the production."

Anthony Tommasini

The New York Times

"Gottfried Helnwein looks more like a rock star than an internationally acclaimed artist. Dressed all in black, with a bandanna around his head and dark glasses hiding his eyes, he resembles, in a superficial way, Bono. Like Bono, he is concerned about the most troubling issues of our times: violence, inhumanity and oppression.
There is a cinematic quality to all of Helnwein's works, which seem to be projected on a wide screen. These "stilled cinematic moments," as Crocker curator Diana Daniels calls them, are powerfully affecting. "He deals with difficult subjects in a way that isn't propagandistic," Daniels said. "It's an open-ended way of dealing with historic subjects that are in danger of slipping away from us." Many of the images are very disturbing, and the museum has issued a warning that some images may be challenging for sensitive or younger viewers. But the show is a powerful one, posing questions we all need to contemplate."

Victoria Dalkey

Art Correspondent, The Sacramento Bee

"All a poet can do today is warn”, World War 1 soldier poet, Wilfred Owen, wrote in a draft Preface for a book of anti-war poems he would never see published. He was killed on the eve of Armistice Day 1918. World War One, The Great War, The War to End All Wars . . . within twenty summers, Europe was engulfed again in the even greater catastrophies of the fascist era. The work of Gottfried Helnwein has its genesis in these years. They obsess him as a creative artist. As a kind of guardian angel, he grapples with them on our behalf. That such a nightmare would never visit us again. Or our children. Or our children’s children. Or “. . .all those still to come."

John Ennis

Head of School of Humanities at Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland

"Helnwein's work is a complex dialectics of corporeality and ideality, accessibility and distance, fragility and invulnerability. In plastic form it is high optical sensitivity (portraits are drawn, yet their photographic basis remains perfectly clear), the forced magic of the fixed stare (the stare of the camera lens and tracking device - no wonder Susan Sontag identified tender homicide in the freeze-frame), heightened physical sensitivity, and coldly estranged form, behind which lie the universal phenomena of love and hate, presence and non-existence. ("There is a certain state of confusion in sensuality, like drowning. It's the nausea you feel when you see a dead body", writes George Bataille)."

Alexander Borovsky

Curator for Contemporary Art at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

"Helnwein is one of the most talented and courageous artists alive--if I may, the Mohammed Ali of the art world."

"Many artists use photographs as references to create their paintings – and this is something that has already existed in the 19th century. Lehnbach painted the famous portraits of his contemporaries after photographs. Gerhard Richter and Gottfried Helnwein have given these photographic materials an additional accent – they have transformed them into paintings - not copied them."

Peter Ludwig

German Art Collector, Founder of many Museums and Foundations for the Arts

"Stunning. It’s the best single word to describe Inferno of the Innocents, the exhibit of work Gottfried Helnwein that opened at the Crocker Art Museum."

Tim Foster

Midtown Monthly, Sacramento

"Gottfried Helnwein isn't just an artist. He is an inspiration, a voice, and his masterpieces will capture your eyes and touch your soul."

arts music fashion magazine

Sacramento

"Four years ago, just before I moved downtown, I was invited to an art opening in the building where I live now. I’ll never forget the incredible feeling that came over me as I was catapulted into the mind and imagination of a true genius. I was literally in awe of the work I saw that night: larger than life images of blindfolded children walking through rivers of dead bodies, a woman holding her unclothed baby boy being examined by Nazi soldiers, a little girl lying asleep on her back; angelic and peaceful, while disfigured faced men stand over her like a science project. All so dark and disturbing yet in some strange way beautiful and familiar.
No matter how I try I don’t know if I could ever explain to you how moved I was that night and how humbled I was by the thought that I might live and work in the very same building with this brilliant artist. I soon came to realize that not only is Gottfried a brilliant artist, thinker, and philosopher, but a kind and gentle man as well, with one of the most beautiful families I have ever met."

"Power is given to Helnwein's confrontations on canvas by virtue of him being an extremely skilled painter. His photo realism is immaculate and highly effective. Even under close scrutiny, the subtle shades and invisible brushwork makes it hard to distinguish the painting from a photograph. This hyper-realism is impressive not because "it looks like a photograph" for that would cancel out the purpose of painting. It is impressive because this controlled application of paint is cool enough to create an air of photo documentation without being sterile."

Joanna Hayman-Bolt

artcritic, London

"As its title suggests, Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child chooses to focus on the Austrian art superstar that the Opera brought in to make its sets and costumes. The movie’s fortunate that said superstar, an eccentric with a thick Werner Herzog accent is as good as he is at painting."

Alex Peterson

"While the two had never met when Levin was alive, the opportunity to meld their work seems almost serendipitous. Helnwein believes their artistic vision is so much the same that he is obligated to stay true to Levin’s work.
Director Lisa Kirk Colburn does an excellent job of portraying the process of an original opera production, particularly from the eyes of Helnwein, the production designer chosen specifically for the perspicacity he has for his art form."

FilmMonthly

"It will prove to be Helnwein’s greatest coup de theater, a hypnotic final-act tableau of dozens of “dead children” suspended in black space. This time there can be little doubt that Helnwein’s judgment is correct; even on screen the effect is startling and eerily beautiful."

The Jewish Week, New York

"One of the great things about this documentary is that, while many out there might be familiar with Helnwein’s artwork or installations, they may not be familiar with where his ideas come from, or what it’s like when he works. In that way, the film is a wonderful look at a stunning contemporary artist."

Film Threat

"What we are allowed to see of the actual production is impressive indeed, in terms of set design, color, lighting and dramatic impact. Helnwein pulls off a fourth-act coup de theatre, staging Levin’s idea of a pile of dead children as a more viscerally exciting image of suspended bodies, like barely alive puppets, which is quite breathtaking."

FilmJournal

"The sets and costumes designed by the artist are indeed visually impressive, especially a haunting image of children suspended over the stage like ascending angels."

The Hollywood Reporter

"Helnwein's eternal theme, inspired by the Holocaust, is children and their violated innocence."

New York Times

"Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child is both a visual feast and landmark union of artistic titans Levin and Helnwein, both concerned with the theme of childhood innocence betrayed."

Atlanta Jewish Film Festival

"Helnwein's vision is revealed as grand and arresting. The film rightly admires Helnwein's work and serves it best when just showing it."

"Looking at Gottfried Helnwein's portraits, we once again experience the shock of the new, of an unprecedented view of the person opposite.
I have observed many people confronted with these portraits for the first time and again and again they would show surprise, intensity of experience and fascination.
Helnwein's portraits can be seen as of the same substance as Cindy Sherman's, she seeing hers as a visual discourse with her times through the example of her own being, or Joel Peter Witkin's, who traces the injuries a person has experienced.
In his self-portraits, bandagings and woundings Gottfried Helnwein pursues similar themes and in his Faces, too, he does not seek the surface but encounters with the individual. In this series of works we meet people we have seen untold times in photographs, yet we could be meeting them now for the first time or, at least, feel we have never seen them so close at hand. "